@unruly
Is that a sneaky advertisement of your coaching services? Seriously though while playing it’s easy to get fixated on one game plan, say on trying to clear the board and survive and forget to add attack values of your minions and compare them with opponent’s health total. That sort of stuff is much easier to notice if you’re spectating.
I’ve been playing Wild last season and it was a very pleasant experience, the undeveloped meta means you’re facing of against wildly different decks even high up the ladder. The deck I found most success with is staring none other than an Old God and everyone’s favorite dragon
http://i.imgur.com/Jm7cav5.png
It’s an adaptation of a Standard N’zoth Dragon priest, tuned to the much faster meta of Wild. Standard version, running double Curators, Shifting Shades and Ysera is the king of grinding. Here I had to cut all these cards and replace them with faster alternatives, but the deck is still strong in that respect, capable of forcing multiple board clears before dropping N’zoth. You will draw all your cheap stuff from time to time and end up in a low resource situation, having something like Lightbomb(or another situational card) and a lonely dragon in hand. In that case you need to keep your dragon in most situations. Since you got your early game chances are you have some health to play with and with so few dragons it’s important to have an activator to make your future plays more powerful.
That leads to another point - this decks really pushes 3 different angles: a dragon deck, a N’zoth deck and a priest deck. As a result none of these aspects are fully developed which leads to weaknesses. Low dragon count makes your early game inconsistent and forces you to be really careful with keeping your dragons later as well as coin usage. Low amount of deathrattle minions makes your N’zoth really good only late in the game(most of the time at least), which makes you vulnerable to other N’zoth decks which can create a huge 2 turn lethal threatening and almost unclearable board as early as t10. Finally you’re lacking a lot of utility cards like healing or Velen’s Chosen, which is great to make all your low attack minions relevant in mid-game.
Card choices/potential changes:
-Zombie Chow - theoretically it has an anti synergy with N’zoth, but practically having a 2/3 is better than not having anything and getting to it for a heal isn’t trivial when it’s behind a belcher. And even if they can get the heal, N’zoth is a lot of the time about board control, not just going face. And most importantly it’s a proactive t1 play that’s effective against cards like creeper, which sw:p doesn’t deal with well.
-Blackwing Technicians - running them over cultists mostly because 5hp is a lot, it threatens trading with a shredder, doesn’t die to truesilver/db. That being said consistency, being another N’zoth minion and deathrattle being very impactful sometimes are strong arguments for the cultists. This is probably the first change I would make to the deck.
-2x Shredder - higher attack than health and stickyness make this card very different to the rest of your early game and it’s your god and savior when you don’t wanna lose the game to kings. Also very strong coin t3 play letting you catch up after a weak early game.
-1x Belcher - great card if you really want to make them value trade with something that isn’t your face. It will still be a value trade though and most of the time it will set you behind on the board. That being said this deck runs no healing apart from hp(and nova), so stopping people from killing you is valued very highly. It’s also crucial for N’zoth, oftentimes having a Belcher to resurrect is what enables you to play N’zoth without dying. And getting a N’zoth off usually means you’ve won. Why not 2? i used to have 2 and 1 shredder, but then i realized fighting for board effectively is more important than just staying alive. That being said 2nd copy would help with N’zoth immensely and adding it is a high priority, just need to find a slot for it.
-lack of Velen’s Chosen - as mentioned it can mentioned before it is very useful at making your small minions actually kill something and a big bigger minions kill big ones. Didn’t find a slot for it, but maybe you could replace one death with it.
-1x Nova - pretty much token removal, sometimes helps with trading. Running this over Excavated Evil because as a board centric deck we don’t want to blow up our stuff. Also most decks in Wild don’t run AoE and giving them one means you suddenly have to start playing around one.
-2x Lightbomb - pretty much only comeback mechanic in the deck, I used to run 1, but I ended up not having it a lot of the time I needed it.
-Sylvanas - pretty much the last slow, value oriented card in the deck. Deck’s early game is good enough that a lot of the time you’ll find yourself not too far behind to play it, it’s also very good before specific opponent turns(eg Tirion) as well as in N’zoth vs N’zoth battles, however it’s by no means a must-have, you can cut it for other stuff(although preferably something with deathrattle to avoid making N’zoth super weak)
-lack of Chillmaw - i never liked the card, tried him in other dragon decks and the situation where he was actually good(ie. blew up more of their stuff than mine) were pretty rare. That being said I’ve heard about a lot of people playing it in their dragon decks, so maybe they’re onto something. It also has the benefit of being another taunt for N’zoth and as mentioned, that’s a big deal. Although it also blows up your N’zoth board, and you can’t always wait to dump your dragons before playing N’zoth.
-Onyxia - as mentioned deck already can outvalue opponents if you draw your lategame, so there’s no need for this lategame to be a Ysera, Onyxia gives you much better board presence and they don’t expect it, so unless it’s a warrior or hunter whelps should be fine. It’s not irreplaceable though, it’s mostly keeping dragon count from sinking too low, but if you find a better dragon to do it with got ahead.
Oh and I almost forgot about mulligan guide. Since wild has such a deck variety you need to assume aggro every time, so the mulligans are virtually the same: keep chow and pain, other than that mulligan for dragon package keeping at most 4 mana dragons(5 with coin). Wyrmrest is a keep only if you have a dragon, blackwing tech if you have a dragon or you expect a 2/4 to to be impactful on t3, say against a hunter, or if you have a dragon.
I was going to write about matchups, but this post is too long already, so I won’t, but if someone would be interested i can do so in the future. Generally if you have any questions feel free to ask.
